| An enterprise is a complex network that involves persons,organizations and the marketing environments.With the rapid development of economy and the continuous advancement of information technology,the competitive environment that enterprises face is becoming more and more complex.The bottlenecks of enterprise development and its management issues have become increasingly prominent.Thus,innovation is to be considered as an essential ingredient of a modern corporate’s core competitiveness.Meanwhile,innovation is becoming more difficult since the development of internet economy has increased the complexity of a corporate’s innovation system.In the times of knowledge economy,a corporate’s sustainable competitiveness relies not only on its internal intellectual knowledge and skills,but also on the inter-corporate resources exchange.As the leader of a corporate,the CEO oversees innovation decisions.Uncertainties of the environment and complexities of innovating made it impossible for a corporate to rely solely on internal resources to meet the needs of corporate innovation.Social network can actualize inter-corporate information exchanging,resources transferring and knowledge sharing.The network relationship can as well directly or indirectly affect the innovation behavior and performance of an enterprise.There are already quite a few studies focusing on the impact of CEO and network embedding on corporate innovation performance.The existing studies mainly surveyed the upper echelons theory,resource-based review and network embedding theory.Most of those studies,however,overlooked the fact that how a CEO’s comprehensive characteristics and most importantly,a CEO’s personality affect innovation performance.This dissertation focusing on network embedding theory,and combining upper echelons theory and resource-based review,closely examines and analyses the mechanisms of how a CEO and network embedding affect innovation performance.This dissertation is to develop the CEO Attributes—Network Embedding—Innovation Performance theoretical framework by employing network embedding as an mediator.Three enterprise were selected as the samples of this exploratory study.Through investigation and interviews,data collection and coding and analysis of various information,this dissertation reveals the different impacts of CEO and network embedding on the innovation performance in the stages of independent innovation,cooperation innovation and network innovation,and thus forms a research framework of the relationship between CEO characteristics,network embedding and innovation performance.Based on the literature review,data coding process,few hypotheses were suggested,They are the different CEO personality traits and CEO social relationship have different effects on innovation performance;network embedding has a mediating effect;the cross-level interaction of different elements have different effects on innovation performance.Then,quantitative data analysis techniques(Hierarchical Regression,Strength Analysis,Structural Equation Modelling(SEM))were deployed for the investigation;the empirical test of the research hypothesis is carried out,and finally conclusions of the relationship between CEO characteristics and corporate innovation performance are drawn.This dissertation defines CEO characteristics into three dimensions:personality,demographics and social relationships.Both regression analysis and SEM suggest that CEO extroversion,risk taking attitude and prospective thinking have a significant and positive influence on innovation performance.Strength analysis yells that the importance of following four traits on innovation performance increase in order——extroversion,proactive personality,risk propensity and achievement motivation.Demographic explains that education background,gender and shareholding positively affect innovation performance.The research failed to identify the correlation between age and term of office with innovation performance.The regression and SEM also tell that CEO political network and business network may positively affect innovation performance.The strength analysis,however,found that business network has more effects on innovation performance than political network.The regression analysis discovered that network embedding has a significant mediating effect.The SEM found out that network embedding fully mediates CEO prospective thinking and innovation performance,and business networking and innovation performance.It partially mediates extroversion and innovation performance,and political network and innovation performance.Many factors could influence innovation performance.The key factor may be within the corporate,inter-organizational relationship,and network organizations,or they can have cross-level impacts.The regression analysis found that 1)the interactions of different levels of elements can cross-levelly affect innovation performance;2)the interaction between CEO personality traits and network density have significant positive effect toward corporate innovation performance,among which extroversion and achievement motivation traits could impact more,and 3)the interaction between CEO personality and network relationship have significant and positive effect towards corporate innovation performance,in which the CEO’s risk propensity trait has a stronger impact.All in all,there are three contributions of this dissertation:1)from a static perspective,via regression analysis and SEM,the study examined how CEO characteristics affect innovation performance.The strength analysis unfolds that a the importance of a CEO’s extroversion,proactive personality,risk propensity and achievement motivation on innovation performance decreases in order;2)this dissertation developed and tested a dynamic embedded process model,which is CEO—internal corporate network-inter-corporate relationship—network-network organization,and it is corporate independent innovation—cooperation innovation—network innovation;(3)this dissertation developed an interaction model of cross-level elements of enterprise networks,and from a static perspective,it is verified that the interaction of different levels of elements may enhance innovation performance. |
PDF Full Text Request